Charities will be able to pay bitcoins into their bank accounts; private users may follow.

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Barclays, one of the the UK's largest banks, will begin to accept Bitcoin later this year. Unless another high street bank rushes to accept Bitcoin, Barclays is set to become the first major bank in the UK, US, and Europe to accept Bitcoin. At the time of publishing, one bitcoin (BTC) is worth about £150 or €204.

According to a report in The Sunday Times, Barclays currently has 75 staff at two of its research labs in London working on accepting Bitcoin. Like most companies and organisations that decide to accept Bitcoin, Barclays won't deal directly with the cryptocurrency—rather, the bank will work with an as-yet-unknown Bitcoin exchange. One possible candidate is Safello: a Stockholm-based Bitcoin startup that Barclays invested in earlier this year.

To begin with, the roll-out will be slow: only charities will be able to pay bitcoins into Barclays bank accounts. Presumably, if everything goes as planned, a larger swath of Barclays customers may be allowed to pay bitcoins into their accounts.

Updated: Barclays contacted us to clarify that it will not be directly accepting bitcoin deposits. "No Bitcoin is travelling through Barclays systems. We are working with some charity clients in a proof of concept to understand how Bitcoin payments might help with their fund raising and fund disbursement needs," a Barclays spokesperson wrote in an e-mail.

Further Reading

For the last couple of years, many of the world's major banks have been toying with accepting Bitcoin, but so far none have taken the plunge. The main issue seems to be that the legality of Bitcoin varies wildly from country to country. Many developed nations, including the UK, US, and most of Western and Northern Europe, have now generally decided that Bitcoin is a legal currency, but there are varying rules on how it should be taxed, and in some cases bit is only legal for private or non-commercial use.

With Barclays looking like it will be the first mover, we wouldn't be surprised if other major banks follow suit in the UK and US. In much the same way that Barclays backed Safello earlier this year, there have been various reports over the years of retail and investment banks sinking money into cryptocurrency-related startups. Most recently, Swiss banking giant UBS opened a FinTech (financial technology) research lab in Canary Wharf, specifically to "explore emerging technologies such as Blockchain and crypto-currencies, and to understand the potential impact for the industry."

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Sebastian Anthony
Sebastian is the editor of Ars Technica UK. He usually writes about low-level hardware, software, and transport, but it is emerging science and the future of technology that really get him excited. Emailsebastian@arstechnica.co.uk//Twitter@mrseb